Change We Can Ritualize

I started my original blog right before the election. Though I did not know who I could vote for, I took comfort in the fact that I was technically ineligible as well as marginally intelligible. I was seventeen, I think, and my blog, which resided at www.livejournal.com/users/iwillstaythisskinnyfortherestofmylife, was not mature enough to handle such subjects.

Then I saw it: George W.Bush’s speech at the Republican National Convention in Philadelphia. I don’t know if it was due to several years of inadvertently breathing toxic air that, for some reason, had its highest concentration in my bedroom, or years of Republicanism that I had been gingerly force-fed by my good-intentioned family, but the speech was amazing. I loved it. I don’t remember it very clearly, but I’m pretty sure that he was wearing a cowboy hat, carrying a lasso, and was on a horse which he was placed upon by compulsory imperialism disguised as manifest destiny. I didn’t know the difference between conservatism and liberalism, and this speech did not help define either.

George W. Bush was eventually elected. And then elected again. His reign over the entire world happened to coincide with the darkest period of my life. I don’t want to compare any personal experiences to, say, 9/11, but my life was pretty great before that day. After that day, my OCD became more of a tangible thing. I started obsessing over the smallest things. I did not care that the Western World was crumbling under the weight of an oppressive, intrusive government. I cared that I knew exactly how many steps it took to walk across the main hallway of my high school. The worse the world got, the worse my condition got. There were little moments of joy. For example, when we captured Saddam Hussein, I think I got an ‘A’ on a Spanish test. When Michael Phelps won his first gold medal, I realized that I was never enrolled in any type of Spanish class.

For the 2008 election, I was excited. I was so excited (unbelievably bored) that I started another blog that would chronicle my rise from regression. I even used the term ‘progressive’ in its title. It was supposed to narrate how I would eventually overcome eight years of setbacks. Instead, it was more a I-don’t-yet-realize-that-literally-anybody-can-read-this-why-did-I-just-say-that. It was graphic. After two and a half years of illustrating all of my misfortunes, I trashed it and started this one. In 2012, let’s vote in a president that that I don’t watch on TV while performing nonsensical rituals that prevent me from getting a hardening-of-the-skin disorder that I saw in a made-for-TV movie in 1997.